Cheesecake with berries, because you do not want me to use a picture of a gallbladder or a gallstone. Trust me. Photo: Wikipedia
I must confess a strange sense of embarrassment when I the surgeon told me he saw a small gallstone on my CT scan. Aren’t gallstones what obese men in their late fifties get when they eat cheeseburgers all day, watch SportsCenter and smoke Pall Malls? My brain also connected “gallstone” with “kidney stone” and boy, I’ve heard some horrific stories about those things. Really, any time a doctor says the word “stone” in conjunction with the words “inside” and “your,” you’ve got some thinking to do.
When I got home and stopped barfing, I read up on gallbladders and what can go wrong with them. A person can get gallbladder cancer, but this is extremely rare. (There’s a terrible, terrible joke here, barely: Q: What did the gallbladder say to cancer? A: “What am I, chopped liver?”) No, it’s mainly just gallstones that afflict our gallbladders. But why and how? First, we have to understand what the gallbladder is for: it does stuff with bile. That’s it, that’s all I can tell you. It’s not important. Well, it isn’t! You can have your gallbladder removed, so how important can it be? Your honor, I rest my case.
Still, you don’t want things going awry in there, and then things do. Gallstones are hardened deposits of digestive fluid. Considering that my guts are made of cotton candy and popsicle sticks, that I would have a digestive fluid problem isn’t a huge leap. Many people have gallstones; most people don’t know they do and don’t have to know because most gallstones are small and harmless. They form for various reasons and yes, one of the reasons is having high cholesterol due to many, many cheeseburgers and no exercise, Pall Malls, etc. But some gallstones form because…well, why shouldn’t they? Don’t judge a gallstone for wanting to live. Gallstones are just like you and me.
My friend told me this morning that he had a terrible time with his gallbladder and nearly had to have it removed; he avoided this in the eleventh hour thanks to medicine and fluids. He did say the pain he experienced was the worst of his life. He passed out and he’s no fainting goat.
I have zero symptoms, though. I think I’m one of the people who will never have to deal with my stone (I like to refer to it as my little “gallpebble,” thank you.) If they have to take it out, though, I ain’t scurred. Actually, it would be kind of exciting. Taking out my gallbladder would increase the number of organs I’ve had excised from three to four. If you count tonsils and four wisdom teeth, now I’m getting to be a real conversation piece. Oh, and there were a couple suspicious moles removed a few years back. Hm. Parts of my body are just flying off into space, aren’t they?
Tomorrow we examine (in words, in words!) my cyst. What nerve! What gall!
I spent the majority of the day in the hospital yesterday, dagnabbit.
Sometimes it seems that I get sick or have something go wrong and when I recover, it’s time to set my stopwatch and wait for the 00:00 to hit and then it’s back to the nurses and doctors. My 00:00 came the other night and yesterday, I could wait no longer to take my watch to the ER.
Starting last week taping TV, I felt this a strange, new pain. (It’s always exciting to experience a symptom for the first time! It’s like making a new friend.) There was intense pain and a strange gripping, clenching, internal dripping (??) feeling around my old ostomy site. I’ve got a fabulous scar to the right of my bellybutton and all around it, tenderness and a disturbing hardness had arrived. And did I detect streaks? Under the skin? Oh, dear. Oh, boy. It was worse when I bent over to pick up my house keys, which happens all the time for some reason.
My new friend Elle (a quilter, no surprise) told me when I got to DC that if I ever needed medical care, to call her immediately. “I know from ER trips,” she said, having taken various members of her family on a regular basis. “I’ll be your advocate. I know about that, too.”
I really, really hate calling in favors, but I did. Elle and baby Miles took me to Sibley and I’m happy to say I received excellent care. Surgeons poked at me, internal medicine doctors prodded me, CT scans were ordered, and pain medicine was blessedly dispensed. I barfed a lot, too. We were there for eight hours and Miles was an angel. He also was useful: when Elle would go out of my room to ask for something, the staff was like, “Oh!! Adorable baby!! Yes, how can we help you? Adorable baby!!”
Results were inconclusive. The surgeon thinks it’s sutures working themselves out, maybe adhesions shifting around. But I got bonus diagnoses: I have a small gallstone and a 2” ovarian cyst on my right side. Wow! And I just came in for what I thought was a piece of my intestine ready to quit on me. I told my surgeon about my lipoma, too. He said it was no big deal and laughed when I told him how I found it.
All you have to do is get out of bed in the morning. Things will happen to you. Experiences will arrive. What will happen today? Time to wake up.
Yesterday was not a good day. It finished well, but it got off to a terrible start.
The terrible day began the night before, which seems unfair. I can share the following detail because a) I cannot remember the last time I did what I did and b) it’s pertinent to my tale of woe:
I was extremely hungover when I woke up. Why was I hungover? Because I was on a painfully lousy date the night before and it was so very, very lousy, I had two Sidecars and then basically chugged a snifter of armagnac. I also attribute my wild behavior to needing some kind of release after taping 40 shows in nine days: 27 Quilty, 13 Love of Quilting. Whatever the reasons, that is far, far too much liquor for me and probably anyone except Frank Sinatra. And in case you’re not aware, armagnac — which for our purposes here it’s essentially cognac — is not to be swilled. It’s a beautiful thing, a strong treat after dinner that is best shared (slowly) with another person over dessert. Part of the pleasantness of cognac or armagnac is that it’s served in a snifter, a footed glass with a wide bowl so that your hands warm the liquor as you take small sips. Did I warm my armagnac? No. Did I share it? No. This was foolish, but sometimes a girl just is and that’s that.
When I woke up, I woke up at four in the morning. I drink rarely because I can’t sleep for poop when I do. It’s not worth it. But my eyes blinked open and I felt wide awake and super grody. When was the last time I was hungover? For the life of me, I can’t remember.
Then, I looked at my bank balance. Not so great. Then I made blueberry paleo bread and it tasted amazing but was so raw in the middle, it was soup. Then I realized I forgot to pay rent this month because I have not been home in two weeks. Then I felt disturbed and scared about a pain that has developed in my abdomen around my ostomy scars. Then I did something that will make all the quilters in the audience gasp and possibly cry. I know I did both.
I washed my favorite quilt, “Whisper,” which is all-white. I neglected to take the hanging sleeve off the back. The hanging sleeve was attached by someone at a show where the quilt was on display and it was made with a multi-colored marbled fabric. The sleeve was not at all colorfast. And my beautiful quilt is now pink.
I know.
Not all of it. The top fourth. I wept. I crossed my arms, dropped my head, and cried. Pardon my French, but goddamnit. I travel this country and advise quilters about how to properly wash quilts. As the former editor of a quilt magazine and the host of several how-to quilting shows, I know, should know, how to properly wash a quilt, and I do. But I overlooked the sleeve. And now “Whisper” is kinda sorta ruined. The good news is that it’s immortalized in my book and will still keep a person warm. Maybe I’ll offer it for sale, on sale.*
We all make mistakes. We all have depressing dinners. We all take too much punch from time to time. And we take punches. I am well aware that my bad day could’ve been far, far worse (e.g., receiving a shattering diagnosis, receiving a life-altering phone call, etc.) but when I saw those pink patches and my head was throbbing, I didn’t feel wise. I felt like the dog’s breakfast.
My heart was gripped with fear the other day when I woke up with a scratchy throat and a sniffle. As of tomorrow, I will have been gone from my home for two full weeks — impossible, all the things that I have done since leaving* — and to falter in the homestretch with a cold (or something worse) is not an option.
But then I sneezed nine times in a row and I realized with a rueful look to no one at all: allergies.
I don’t have seasonal allergies anymore, for the most part. I have lived a city since 2001 and in a city, the beauty of nature is stamped out and destroyed by the fumes of cars, the steam that rises from the subway, and the crushed glass of millions of shattered dreams that carpets the cold, hard cement. Pollen doesn’t stand a chance and that’s been fine by me for years.
Because when my sisters and I were kids, good grief did we suffer. Ragweed is Iowa’s kudzu: stand still for a moment and you will be covered in microscopic beads of death. The wretched stuff — which doesn’t even have the class to originate in a lovely flower but in a weed — would snake its way into our mucous membranes and ruin us and this always happened when school started for the year. My nerdy sisters and I would be so excited for school and then we’d remember that we were social pariahs who had to carry a box of Kleenex with us at all times. Really, we all had boxes of Kleenex that we carried with us to all our classes or put in our desks.
Itchy. Runny. Sneezy. You could’ve called us by those names and we would’ve answered you. My sister Rebecca actually wadded up little wicks of Kleenex to stick up her nostrils. She didn’t do that at school but the moment she got home, up the nose they went to staunch the flow. (She still uses that method when she has a runny nose for whatever reason.) We were miserable. And I try to ignore the nagging resentment I have that no one thought to take us girls to a freaking allergist or at least try some weird home remedy that might relieve our pain. I can still remember the raw, stinging feeling when I’d blow my nose for the 10,000th time, tissue on red, raw skin and then, insultingly, a sneeze attack.
Allergies, you can flirt with me. Go ahead. I’m heading home tomorrow and I’ll return to Washington where ragweed ain’t even a thing. I’m not allergic to cherry blossoms, neither. Take that.
*Filmed 27 episodes of Quilty, performed poetry in front of lots of people, filmed 13 episodes of Love of Quilting, saw Yuri. Went on a date. Wrote things. Played rope toy with Mom’s dog, Scrabble.
Chaiwa-Tewa girl with butterfly hair arrangement. Photo: Northwestern University Library, Edward S. Curtis’s ‘The North American Indian’: Photographic Images, 2001.
In 2005, I went to a sweat in a sweat lodge in the desert of New Mexico. The ritual was lead by a Native American from the Tewa tribe* and it was, as you can imagine, really hot in there.
Going to a real sweat lodge for a purification ceremony sounds like something a person would seek out and pay handsomely for in the name of spiritual enlightenment or woo-woo. But my sweat happened by pure chance and that made it more remarkable (and more woo-woo, I suppose.) Here’s what happened:
I was in Albuquerque for the 2005 National Poetry Slam. I was slamming on the Green Mill team that year; I can’t remember how our team did, but just being at Nationals was good enough for me — Nationals is the biggest competition of the year and a huge party. Plus, I was excited to be in Albuquerque; I had never been there before and was taken with the adobe, the baked streets, the tumbleweed, the dust. At that time in my life, I was what you’d call “straight-edge.” That meant that I didn’t drink alcohol or take drugs, ever, not even a little bit. That might not seem impressive, but it sorta was because I was twenty-four and hung out with poets and writers. Poets and writers are not known for temperance, I don’t know if you heard. My position on such things made me an odd man out; I had to look hard for my kinsmen.
I found some on that trip. Over the few days I was there, I fell in with a group of people who also strictly abstained from all mind- and mood-altering substances. We hung out in the downtown area after the slam competitions wrapped and watched poets from Portland and L.A. and Asheville get absolutely wasted as they went from bar to bar. We felt self-righteous and enlightened, I’m sure, and we were probably as insufferable in our own ways as the hard-partying poets were in theirs.
On the morning of the last day, while everyone else was nursing hangovers (or still out from the night before) one of my new friends asked us if any of us wanted to do a “sweat.” He was a 6’10 Native American man of indeterminate age. He wasn’t a poet at the competition but a friend of a friend and I had spent enough time around him by that point that I could make the call about his skeeviness or lack thereof: no skeeve detected. I’ll do it, I said, as long as we could be back by lunchtime to head to the airport. No problem, our friend said, so several of us — including two women and I wouldn’t have gone if I was the only female — hopped into the back of his pickup and we headed out into the desert.
The sweat lodge was a homemade hut in back of the man’s clapboard home. It looked like an igloo wrapped in blankets and furs with a hole up at the top where the smoke could escape. Before we went in, our friend told us what to expect. He told us to remember to breathe, breathe, breathe, and to not freak out when we felt like freaking out. He also said that if we felt like we were dying, we needed to say something. He told us this as we stood around this enormous fire pit — the stones needed for the ceremony were deep in the bottom of the fire pit, for this is how they would get hot enough to use. We threw all this wood in and stood back from the wall of heat that rose up. It was bizarre to be at a roaring fire in the morning in the desert. It added to the strangeness of the entire experience but I didn’t feel uncomfortable in the least, didn’t feel like I was in the wrong place.
We were instructed to head into the lodge. We ducked down and took our seats around the circle. Our host had a helper who arrived at some point and they went about transferring the searing hot rocks to the middle of the circle. Every time they brought in a rock the lodge got about 30-degrees hotter. Sweat was already rolling down my back, dripping into my eyes. Then the two men came in and I saw both carried a large cistern of water. The flap on the lodge closed and we were all plunged into darkness.
My friend intoned Native American music and words and his assistant beat a drum. A loud “Ssssssss!” cracked through the music when water was poured onto the hot stones and steam would blow us all back; this happened again and again until it was hard to tell where my body ended and the steam and heat began. I remembered to breathe. Once I let myself relax into such a bizarre, exciting, we-ain’t-in-Kansas-anymore experience, I felt some kind of peace or joy, I suppose; maybe it was even a little transcendent. I’m not a woo-woo gal in the least, but I suppose if you go to an authentic sweat given by an actual Native American at his desert home and don’t feel something, you are too cynical.
Did I have visions? No. Did I find my spirit animal? No. Did my skin look amazing when I left? You bet your kokopelli. I have kept in touch with no one from that group, but I remember some of their faces. I can’t remember names of people I meet — like, I forget them the moment I learn them — but I never forget a face.
Me and a little dude with a tail, Chicago Botanical Garden, 2015. Photo: Yuri
Yuri was in Chicago over the weekend, also.
We spent time together on Monday. After work tasks were complete, he took me to the Chicago Botanical Garden to walk, to talk, and remember each other for awhile.
The Chicago Botanical Garden is a world-class joint. Hordes descend upon the place in warmer months but somehow milling among thousands of people doesn’t feel bad at the Botanical Gardens; it feels communal. English gardens, Japanese gardens, fields of field flowers, a glassy pond, sculptures big and small — if it’s green and cultivated you want, green and cultivated you shall have and there’s a great cafe for when you’re exhausted from walking and have pollen all over your shirt. It’s also free to get in.
Yuri and I walked through the grounds arm in arm. We did this because we care about each other a great deal but we were also freezing cold. Nothing has bloomed, yet; there were a few brave shoots poking up here and there, but not many. All the plants are waiting, checking final items off the pre-production list before the big launch.The greenhouses were thriving — greenhouses do that — so when we were almost too cold to be having fun, we found a greenhouse and slipped in to warm up. Tip: if you’re feeling disconnected from nature, pop yourself into a balmy, breathing greenhouse. You’ll get fixed right up.
We had fun together. We got soup and a glass of wine at the cafe. We argued. I cried. We laughed. Walking on the main promenade under the cold, grey sky, Yuri picked me up and spun me around and I hollered, “No! Don’t! Yuri, stop!” but it was okay. New York, we have both decided, seems like a dream. It’s a trite thing to say, but damned if I know how else to describe it. The East Village? Really? Manhattan? But when? I know why — passion, risk, love, adventure — but as to the how, I couldn’t tell you if you put a Rhododendron ferrugineum to my neck.
Yuri and I aren’t together, but we’ll always be together because of New York, because of Chicago, because of that day in the garden, I guess. When do you stop being connected to a soul?
That picture up top is one of a series Yuri took of me being a mom to a hunk of bronze.
Seeing Bert and Ernie chopped in half and placed under glass is making my inner child hysterical and traumatized, but at least they’re the real mccoy. Photo: Wikipedia
There are ribbons tied to my fingers; some go from there to this keyboard and some flutter out and lay in the pages of my journal. This is clearly annoying and counter-productive if I’m doing anything but sitting at my laptop or writing in my journal.
It’s TV taping time. Yesterday, I filmed three fantastic shows with Mom. I feel okay saying that the shows are getting better every time we do this. It’s not a new job anymore. I got this. And I like it, too.
On the set, doing this job, the ribbons have to be tucked away. Frankly, it’s kind of a relief. It’s good to be around the crew that I love, good to have those hot lights on me, good to meet the guests and do the job, which I see as simple: make the other person look good. That’s it. And so I can take all the focus off me and shift it to the other person. No brooding, no decisions to be made outside of what patchwork unit we need to teach next.
And there’s a Bert and Ernie in the lobby of the Iowa Public Television! This is the best place to be today.
Sunrise over Israel, but it looks like rural Iowa to me. Photo: Wikipedia.
I would not wish the feeling I have this morning on any man or beast under the sun.
I’m sitting in the window of a beautiful hotel in Chicago. Out the glass is the fairest city of them all; I’m on Chicago Avenue no less, and there is the wide street, there is the church and there is the steeple and open the shade and see all the people. My last Quilty shoot taped this weekend, but it’s not the bittersweetness of that that is making my heart ache in my chest. It feels like a brick is sitting on me.
What will I do? Whatever will I do and what have I done, leaving this place?
I’ve fallen for Washington. I’m having a love affair with that city and I’m pulled there. When I came to Chicago I was a lump of un-molded clay. I was a child, twenty-one years old and afraid. In fourteen years here the city formed me into a person I’m more or less proud of, though I did plenty to be ashamed of. I became a poet here, going to the Green Mill slam week after week, year after year; it was poetry school, I majored, I might have even graduated. I made (and witnessed) some of the best art of my life with the Neo-Futurists for five years after that. I was married and divorced here. I moved from the north to the south and in the south, found a me I loved to live with. Quilty was born here, too; born and ended, at least for me.
When I moved to Washington by way of New York, I arrived in that city with my shape. The safety of that, the relief, not being a lump of clay, it makes me want to stay there. It’s easier than when I arrived in this town. But I went to the Mill last night and did poems; I slammed and won. And at the end of the show — that magnificent, enduring, eternal show — I had the honor of closing it with Marc and Baz, blending in a Larkin poem with Baz on piano and Marc bookending. It was nothing short of sublime. This morning, I feel insane to think I would not come back here, to that show and so much more, in June. My heart is a terrible, wretched thing. You do not want to be me, I assure you.
All of these words, more or less, were written in my journal before I began this post and perhaps they should’ve stayed there. Too close the bone, maybe; maybe maudlin, even. But someone wrote to me and thanked me for being vulnerable and if you like that or appreciate that, my friend, this is for you. It doesn’t get more vulnerable than this. I’m vulnerable here at the window, two cities pulling at me, two paths in the woods and no clue, no clue.
I leave in a matter of hours for Iowa to tape the TV show for a week and a half. Perhaps going to yet another place — to my birthplace — will soothe this pain and perhaps on those landlocked shores I can decide. It’s nearing time to decide, indeed, and I’m looking up at the sky. That, at least, is the same over us all, no matter where we are in the world, wherever we are in America.
German warning sign. That’s what my box looked like! Photo: Wikipedia
Yesterday I tripped and fell flat on my back. Since I’m okay, it’s hilarious.
It’s strange to trip and fall down as an adult. Toddlers fall all the time because they’re figuring out how to walk. Children fall because they’re running and playing. And of course the elderly fall sometimes and that is dangerous and can even lead to death if they can’t get to a phone for help or if the fall is particularly bad, what with all those brittle bones. But to fall all the way down to the ground in one’s thirties is a rare occurrence and disorienting.
Here’s what happened: I had to ship a huge box of wardrobe and quilts to Chicago. I printed out my UPS label and went to take it down to the front desk of my building for pickup. On the way to the elevator, I decided to just push the box with my foot; I had my purse and my computer bag in my hands.
When I got to the elevator and the doors opened, I kept trying to kick the box in but it was getting caught in the space between the hall and the floor of the elevator. I leaned into the box and when I really tried to give it a shove with my whole leg, that’s when I fell, tumbling over the box, right into the elevator. I was “a– over elbows,” as they say; finding myself looking at the ceiling of the elevator. My purse went flying and my computer bag fell with me with a troubling thud.
After I recovered, I burst out laughing. Then I got up to collect my things and myself off. The elevator doors kept trying to shut on that darned box until I finally pulled the thing in. I thanked my lucky stars no one had seen this.
The last time I fell as an adult, I was walking on an icy sidewalk. And in middle school, I was running way too fast and tripped on concrete, flat on my face. I broke my nose or at least cracked it; I never saw a doctor, so I have this strange little bump on the side of my nose that has never gone away. You can’t really see it, but I know it’s there.
Munitions plant worker has a date with her boyfriend. Photo: National Film Board of Canada.
When I visit big groups of quilters to lecture or teach, it’s not uncommon for one or two of the ladies to ask me if I’m single and then, when I reply that yes, I am, they suggest that I date their son.
“Oh, he’s very sweet, very sweet,” they say, and usually something about how handsome he is. I have no doubt all these men are both, but as sincere as they are, it’s probably unlikely I’ll go on a date with one of these sons. I live in D.C., which is a long way from Omaha, say, or Pensacola. Most of the time the proud moms will sigh and say something like, “That is a problem, isn’t it?” Yesterday, this did not deter one mother.
“You are single, aren’t you, Mary? My son’s coming to pick me up after the lecture,” she said, “And you need to meet him.”
“Yes,” I laughed, “I’m single.” To humor her (good-naturedly, of course) I asked, “What’s his name?”
“Brian,” she said. “You’ll love him!”
“Well, I’m sure he’s fantastic,” I said, “but I live in DC. It’s not so convenient to date someone in St. Louis, you know.”
Without skipping a beat, she said, “Oh, he’ll move! He’ll move.”
I didn’t meet Brian. It might’ve been a little awkward, but it’s not that I avoided it; Mom and I were absolutely wiped after our third day in Missouri and we high-tailed it out of there. I should book more gigs in the D.C./Virginia area. There are many moms with many sons and no one has to move.
“The Little Lame Prince and His Traveling Cloak,” by Dinah Maria Mulock, 1909; illustration by Hope Dunlap.
What’s wrong with me?
I go out on the open road, I long for my bed. I long for the crisp sheets that I washed in the morning and put lovingly on the bed for the moment when I’d sink down into the white. Out there is the lush green of Georgia, the thunderstorms over St. Louis, but once there I long for the sewing machine that is always right where I left it. I love my luggage, but I miss my sink. Even the dumb kitchen sponge.
I come home and I embrace my sponge and my french press with an almost uncomfortable enthusiasm; these are inanimate objects, Fons. I realize that, but god how I missed you, little kitchen sponge, little frenchy-french. Then, watch a week go by and what happens? I wake before sunrise, as always, and pad to the kitchen and lo, the faintest sigh of longing comes as I go about my ritual: fill kettle, turn on burner, rinse french press, put in tea, close tea container, pour cream into pichet, get spoon for honey. Put all on tray. Scratch. Yawn. Think about life. Look at counter. Feel desire to scour it later. Wait for water to boil. Wait for the quotidian to kill me, eventually.
When the tea is ready, I’m so happy to have that morning hit of sweet, creamy Earl Grey, I forget that moments ago, I wished I was out on the road. Out of the house. Out of me, I guess.
I can’t be pleased and it drives me to drink (tea.) Forget the grass being greener; I don’t care about green. I just want the grass to be interesting. And what I can’t figure out is if there’s more to be found by chopping wood and carrying water day in, day out at the homestead or more to be found seeking whatever’s new around every single corner that I meet.
George Harrison said, “The farther one travels/the less one knows.” And there was a Swedish painter I read about years ago who never, ever left his hometown and painted the most wonderful paintings. His thing was, basically, “What on earth is there more beautiful than this? Why would I go anywhere else? I mean… Look.” But come on. Where would we be without the peripatetic, the restless, the road dog? We’d be at home. Booooring.
On Thursday, I go to St. Louis for four days. I’ll be lecturing with Mom, which tonight makes me so happy I could cry. Most of the time I travel alone. With Mother, you see, I get the best of both grassy worlds: I have the familiarity and comfort of my very own mom mixed with the plane and the pavement, the hotel room and the view of The Gateway To the West from whatever hotel room I’m assigned.
Somebody please tell me what the Sam Hill I’m supposed to be and just what I’m supposed to do. I assure you I have no clue. None.
America is not always easy on the eyes. We’re disfigured, materially and psychically. You see the rips and tears in the outskirts of Baltimore. Once-thriving small towns in Nebraska are pock-marked, defeated. Suburban malaise spreads and spreads like runny, watery jam. The ants are either coming or they’ve already set up shop. I don’t like ants. I’ve never liked jam, either, while we’re at it.
But I love America anyway. I believe being a patriot means just that: seeing the whole mess and loving it anyway.
Part of the way I earn my bread these days is by traveling across this country, which means I get a good look at the thing. A friend and I were trying to figure out how many states he had visited and I had him beat with a stick. He’s never been to Minnesota! Or Nebraska! Or Iowa! I realize these states do not have the glamour profile of California or New Hampshire, but the rolling green hills pushed up by the mighty Mississippi? The endless blue sky of Kansas? The splendor, however diminished, of downtown Minneapolis? These are American gifts, every bit the knockouts of a Connecticut in autumn or a Sonoma during the grape harvest. Don’t make me get out Great American Literature, man. I ain’t afraid to hit you with Dos Passos, Twain, Cooper, Cather. You get into those and you’ll be on the next flight to the flyover states, looking for the American splendor you’ve been missing.
I’m in Columbus, Georgia tonight, resting up for a packed day tomorrow with the GALA (that’s Georgia/Louisiana) quilters. We did a meet-and-greet this evening; tomorrow it’s two lectures, a workshop, and a trunk show and book signing. My evening will be free and my hosts asked me if I wanted to go see the downtown area, take in a view of the Ocoee River, at least drive past the American Infantry Museum though it’ll be too late to go inside. Yes, I want to see these places. Yes, I want to get a feel for this place before I leave, before I know it. I’m a citizen of this country, after all. I ought to know where I live.
Columbus is Detroit is Palatine is Napa is New Haven is Greenwich is Pensacola is Boise is Brooklyn is Dyerstown is Eugene is Toledo is West Ridge is Princeton is Davenport is Fairfield is Bangor is you is me is you is me is me is me is you is you is me.
Do you have quilts in your house that are just sitting there? Are they folded, perhaps in the closet, perhaps on a shelf? Put another way: is it time for you to give some quilts away? Probably.
Generosity is in quilters’ DNA. We typically do give quilts away, which is fabulous if you’re a person who knows a quilter, because if you wanted to buy a beautifully made, king- or queen-sized quilt, it would cost you several thousand dollars; if a quilter loves you, you get it for free.
I give quilts away because there is nothing worse than looking at a stack of beautiful quilts languishing in my closet or in baskets around the house. What good are they doing there? The joy is in the making. Once the quilt is finished — unless it’s one I’m going to use for teaching or one that means so very, very much to me personally it’s like a limb — it’s time to give it away. Everyone but everyone needs a handmade quilt.
Today, my bestest friend Sarah got her quilt. It was a wedding gift way overdue. It’s the cover quilt for my book, Make + Love Quilts (available at fine bookstores everywhere!) It’s perfect for her, her husband Seth, and their kids, Little Seth and baby Katherine.
The quilt is out of my studio, out of my home, out of my life. I couldn’t be happier.
This would be money. Photo: Rose garden at Castle Bank, Kirkcudbright; harbor view.
Far worse than the feeling I had other day was that I allowed myself to indulge it for longer than .05 seconds.
I’ve connected with lots of fantastic people here in D.C. (quilters, I’m looking at you.) Lately, I’ve been spending time with a group of people who I would describe as fancy. These new friends are warm, they’re smart, and they’ve been extremely successful in their work. As a result of this last, their homes are — the two I’ve been in, anyway — exquisitely beautiful and well-appointed. Enormous art that costs more money than many folks take home in a year hangs on the walls; the lights are low. The wine glasses are fishbowl-size. The tiles in all five bathrooms are heated. The stereo system apparently works by way of air molecule; wherever you go in the house, Carla Bruni sings to you at a soft level that is surely scientifically-proven to be best for optimal aural pleasure. There are bidets, guest houses, pools. Stuff like that.
So I’m standing in the living room of one of these houses the other day and I suddenly felt a deep and terrible longing. And I felt like a guttersnipe. I’m just some dumb kid from Iowa. I’m a writer. I make quilts. Who cares? Sure, my shoes were fabulous, but I felt like a real phony-baloney, like okay, I have this great pair of shoes but these people have closets and closets of shoes and they don’t even think twice about them and here I am, excited about my dumb ol’ shoes. Envy, as it turns out, is less a toothy, green-eyed monster and more a sad, black mold over the heart. My life seemed small and I felt so far, far away from the life I saw before me. And I wanted that life. And I felt shabby.
And then I got mad. At myself. Really, really mad.
Unbelievable. How dare I? How dare any of us compare our lives to the lives of others in this way? Look, I’ve earned my place on this earth. To allow myself to feel less-than compared to anyone (even if they have their own table at Daniel) is a grave offense. It’s insulting; it’s also whiny and indulgent. I told myself to knock it off — and if you’re given to this kind of thing or have experienced it lately, you knock it off, too. To smack around or otherwise disrespect your hard-won experience, your unique outlook and perspective, to throw your life’s portfolio in the garbage or hide it behind your back because you want to be someone else, this is the only thing you should be ashamed of. Not your shoes. Not the space you take up. But at turning your back on who you are and what you’ve earned.
I love my quilts. I love my poems; after I left where I was that day and got over my damned self, I found myself loving them more. I’m proud of what I’ve done in my life so far and you should be proud of what you’ve done. It matters. You don’t need an invitation to a gala or a Maserati in the garage to be crucial.
My apartment is only a few square feet bigger than the master bathroom in the house where I was, no fooling. But it’s mine. And when I take a shower, I get just as clean.
This child is so cute and posed so oddly under this planter, she looks like a wax figurine in a glass case. Still cute as a button. Photo: Angela Sevin, 2005.
I had the pleasure of visiting my southern belle girlfriends recently, including the lovely Lady of The Livermush. Ol’ Livermush did something remarkable again and I have to talk about it. (Understand that I can call this girl “Ol’ Livermush” because she looks she stepped out of a Vermeer painting or the pages of Valentino’s latest ad campaign. She’s gorgeous.)
We were finishing up dinner and the table’s attention landed on my friend as she was explaining a writing exercise she had done when she was five years old.
“Ah was just fahve,” she said with the accent I’d kill for. “And ah wrote this on mah paper, ah swear:
I like to eat ice cream. I like to eat cheese. I like to be tan. I like to lay on the beach.
“Then,” she said, “On the next page, do you know what ah wrote? Ah wrote:
Sometimes I’m grompy.
“And ah spelled it just like that, too: grompy.” She shook her head. “Do you know nothin’s changed? Ah still like ice cream. Ah still like cheese. Ah like to be tan and laah on the beach. And I do get grompy, sometimes. Don’t we all?”
When I learned she spelled “grumpy” “grompy,” I laughed so hard I made a honking sound into my napkin. Not since the appearance of “hangry” — what you get when you’re so hungry you become angry — has there been a new word so perfectly onomonopoeic. Now, Ol’ Livermush simply spelled “grumpy” the way it sounded to her. But to me, “grompy” can — and should — now define a very specific sort of bad mood: the bad mood that happens to you when you’re disgruntled (probably about something work-related) and you’re having gastrointestinal issues. Right? Have I got it? Let’s take it for a spin:
Person A: What’s wrong with you? Person B: Look, I’m just a little… I’m a little grompy today, sorry.
or:
Person A: Stay away from Chuck today… Good lord is he grompy.
or perhaps:
Mother: Pick up your crayons! Child: No! Mother: I’m giving you to the count of five, Mr. Grompypants. ONE…TWO…
We’ve been given a gift, comrades, and you have Livermush to thank for it. Livermush, the great educational reformer Horace Mann once said, “Until you have won some victory for humanity, you should be ashamed to die.”
Livermush, please do not die. But if you should, know that your job here was done.
Close your eyes and think of anywhere, anywhere else, little girl.
This post is from April, 2014. I had reason to think of it the other day and thought I’d repost. I’d tell you to enjoy but you can’t, really.
I’m in Iowa filming TV. Tonight, the editorial team and several of our guests went out to dinner.
Halfway through the day, I began to feel poorly due to my excavated intestines. I therefore didn’t eat much and had the opportunity to visit the ladies’ room at the restaurant several times over the course of our dinner. On one of those visits, something awful happened.
I was in the furthest stall from the entrance when I heard the door open. Laid out in a kind of “L” shape, I’m sure the bathroom appeared empty. Ambient noise from the restaurant slipped in and then faded as the door gently closed. The moment that it had, I heard the unmistakable sound of someone being slapped across the face.
Hard.
A brief pause. Then an intake of air, and a child’s wail came high, high off the mountain and down into a deep, anguished sob. Confusion and shock and pain came crashing down in a tidal wave in a bathroom in Des Moines, IA.
“What is wrong with you?!” a woman’s voice hissed. And there was a tussle, a shake.
My rage came up fast from my legs to the very bottom of my throat. It stopped at my throat because I was speechless with horror and disgust for the slapper and an almost frantic need to console the child and take her into my arms.
I burst out of the stall the moment the two were going into the first. Their door shut. As I passed them, slowly, I could see the child now sitting on the toilet with the mother standing over her. Her scuffed up sneakers were dangling off the side of the toilet. Even now, I can see their little velcro straps.
My jaw was clenched so tight I might’ve shattered all my teeth.
“Where did you learn to make faces like that at Mommy?” the woman asked, now with a sticky, simpering tone in her voice. She screwed up, see. She thought the bathroom was empty. Now that she knew someone was there and had heard her hit her kid in the face, she was a little nicer.
The child wept. Plaintive, pathetic weeping. She was trapped. I stood at the sink and looked through my reflection in the mirror. I had to do something. I had to.
Once again I find myself, a single woman with no children, opining about parenting. I realize there’s a lot I don’t know about raisin’ up a chile; most ideals and proclamations about how I’ll do it someday are so much talking. But the argument that I know zero about childrearing because I presently have no children goes only so far. I am a human, and children are humans, so I’m qualified to take a position. You can’t be angry when you punish a kid, goddamnit. You calm yourself down, you get a hold of yourself, and then you figure out the negative consequences for that kid’s bad behavior. Never, ever punish out of anger. Is this not true? Is this not a stance I can take now, as a woman who has yet to hold her own baby?
So I’m standing at the sink in the bathroom, mentally eviscerating this kid-hitting woman four feet from me, and I remember a story my friend Lisa told about a similar situation she found herself in. She was on the subway in New York and this guy was roughing up his girlfriend. Really talking menacingly to her and smacking her around. Lisa was enraged. She was panicking. She needed to stop it, to say something to the guy. But she didn’t. Ultimately, she didn’t because, as she had to so horribly reason out, it might’ve made it worse for the woman later. The monster on the subway was maybe at 60%; at home, after an altercation on the train, would he hit 79%? 90% monster? What will monsters do at full capacity? Lisa burned and was quiet and told the story to me later, as upset at the time of telling me as she was that day on the train.
No, I wouldn’t speak. I wouldn’t make it worse for that little girl when she got to the comfort — the comfort — of her own home. But then I did do something. Something else that took me as much by surprise as I hope it took the monster.
Alone with them there in the bathroom, I smacked my right hand against my left. Loud. I made perfect contact with the one hand on the other: a loud crack sounded in the bathroom, bouncing off the tile and the linoleum. The talking in the first stall stopped. The sniffling ceased. I could almost see the confusion on the woman’s face and the “Wha?” on the kid’s.
I waited for total silence and then I did it again: crack! A crisp, violent sound.
In that moment, I might as well have been a professional sound effects person, paid thousands to come into a recording studio to capture the exact sound of someone being smacked across the face. Luck was on my side; if I tried to make that sound just so, right now, I might not be able to do it. But tonight, it was exactly what I needed it to be.
The slap hung in the air like a gun had been shot. I could tell no one in that first stall was breathing. The mother was surely, totally weirded out. The daughter, I don’t know, but at least for that moment her nasty mother wasn’t in charge. Of anything. I sent a silent, psychic message of love and hope to the little girl and then left the bathroom.
I had to run this story past my mom. Until I did, I wasn’t sure if my slap sounds were completely insane or if they were effective in breaking the evil spell that had entered the ladies’ room. Mom, who cried with me when I told her about hearing that little girl get hit, said she thought it was a great move. So there you go. We have an actual parent weighing in on how to do these things.
Don’t hit your kid in the face. That’s just a suggestion. But here’s another one: if you choose to hit your kid in the face in a public place, you are in my world. And my world might be kinda weird, but your kid is safer with me than she is with you.
The best way to tend a bruised heart is to go on a date with someone new. That’s what they say.
The breaking up of love, the move, the rats, the second move, the hemogoblins, etc. — all this has meant that for many moons my cocktail dresses have stayed put on their hangers, my evening bags and high heels in dust bags on the shelf. Not too long ago I began to look longingly at it all and I realized I might like to go out for dinner with a good-looking man. I’m absolutely allergic to love right now, but dinner would be nice. Maybe even some smooching would be nice. I’m a grown woman.
Well, I did go on a date and I even smooched but what’s really noteworthy about the whole thing is that mid-smooch I was diagnosed with an ailment I can now add to my list of ailments. I’m 100% serious.
My dinner companion, who I met online, is a doctor. He wore a beautiful suit and his Range Rover, as I would come to find out, had excellent butt warmers. (That is not a euphemism.) I wore a luscious, canary yellow dress with my favorite Dolce & Gabbana heels: black satin with bows on the toes. Dinner was great. I picked the restaurant: a mahogany-paneled, real power-dinner place where I know heads of state have done dirty deeds dirt cheap in the corner booths. There was a live piano player and a standup bass. The conversation flowed, the steaks were rare, the champagne was right on time. All of this factored into my mind as I looked at this very handsome fellow across the table from me and tried to decide if I’d let him smooch me when he dropped me off at home. Yes, I decided. Yes, I would.
We pull up to the door of my building about an hour later and we start smooching and it’s going great; he smelled incredible, all soap and cologne. He said all the right things, e.g., “You’re gorgeous,” and “You’re such a great kisser,” and a few other things that are not appropriate to mention here (hi, Mom.) So then Dr. Smooch gives me a little squeeze, kinda on my hip. I liked that a lot, so he squeezed me again. Then he like, poked me there on my hip a little. Poke, poke.
“You have a lipoma here,” he said.
I shot back like a shrimp and crammed myself against the window of the passenger seat. “What?! What are you saying? What do I have??” I felt just where his hand had been on my dress, there on the left side, right at my pelvic bone. Sure enough, there was a small bump that wiggled around when I massaged it.
He chuckled. “It could just be a muscle,” he said, poking it again. “It’s nothing serious. Just a little fat deposit.” I looked up at him. I had just been diagnosed with a fat deformity mid-makeout session, proving to me once again that if you just get out of bed in the morning, if you just get out of bed and walk out the door, things will happen to you. Things you could never have imagined. Things like this.
Thanks, Doc. I’ll get it looked at. Now, where were we?
Madonna, Rotterdam, August 26, 1987. Photo: Wikipedia
I had three entirely new experiences today:
I chose to wear my Nike Dunks, favorite black pants, a crisp white shirt and a fedora this morning when I left the house. A real nice man on the street called to me: “Girl, you lookin’ good to-DAY! That’s a nice outfit!” In kind reply, I said “Why, thank you!” and literally tipped my hat to him. I tipped my hat! It surprised me how naturally it came. When you’re wearing a fedora, apparently you live in the 1956.
On a busy street in Penn Quarter, a homeless man took out his penis and peed on the sidewalk. I saw it all before deciding to walk much, much faster.
I went to the FOX News building and went on camera and now I’m all over the news in Europe!
The first experience explains itself; the second experience isn’t something I want to expound upon, so let’s talk about this third thing because man, was it cool.
Several years ago, a chap named Oli contacted me for an interview. Oli was writing a big paper on slam poetry and he tracked me down. We Skyped a few times because Oli is a Brit and lives in London. Oli must’ve done well in school because he’s got a seemingly impressive job with SkyNews, a kind of AP wire in the UK. We’ve stayed in touch here and there, and Oli reads my blog enough to know that I live in Washington, now. He also knows I’m a huge Madonna fan because I’m sure I said as much in our first interview.
Oli texted me from London this morning to see if I could dash down to the SkyNews bureau — housed within FOX News — and speak on camera about Madonna. She fell last night at the Brit Awards. It was a scary fall; her cape malfunctioned and she went backwards down three stairs. Beyonce, Gaga, and Naomi Campbell have all taken famous tumbles: it happens. When you’re dancing onstage in high-heels three-hundred days out of the year, what do you expect? Because I wrote an essay in a book called Madonna & Me (Soft Skull Press, 2012)* I am an expert on Madonna and clearly have something devastatingly insightful to say on such a breaking news story.
I got to the big FOX News building and security cleared me. I went up to the fifth floor and took lots of selfies in front of lots of monitors. The girl who met me said, “Thank you for coming. Would you like your hair and makeup done?”
All nonchalant, I was like, “Oh, yes, well, maybe I should, you know, with the snow and all.” Getting my hair and makeup done at FOX News was not something I was going to pass up. She asked me if I wanted something to drink, too, and I said I would like some water please and thank you very much.
I went into the makeup room and was met by two of the most stylish, laconic, “we’ve-seen-it-all” makeup artists on the planet. They were just hanging out in this room with special chairs all the bright makeup lights, waiting for the next person to come in. Who were the people who came in? The talking heads you see on TV! Three of them came into the makeup room while the gals were working on me! I saw dudes in the chair next to me getting powdered and then I saw them on live TV like ten minutes later! It was so weird and fun. The lady with bright red hair did my makeup and the other lady did my hair. The hair lady had geometric glasses and really, really long nails that she used to squiggle through my hair to make it go this way and that.
Once I was all done — and I looked good but not at all like myself, which is why getting hair and makeup done isn’t really that great, so don’t feel like you’re missing anything if you’ve never had the experience — I went into the green room. I couldn’t sit down because I was going to be on live TV in like ten minutes! I just paced and made myself not drink the free Keurig coffee they had set up. I didn’t want to get up there and talk too fast.
The gal came in for me. I went into one room and taped a segment for the radio with one British dude. Then I went into another room where all the cameras were, got my earpiece and was given my lapel mic. I stared into the void of the big camera and eventually a lady started asking me questions. The live segment got pushed further and further out because there was a lot of bad news in the UK today — and this bad news does not include Madonna falling at an awards show. In the end, the live segment never took place, which was a bummer, but my taped segment was a smash, and Oli has informed me that the interview is being played on the hour in 118 countries. I don’t totally understand this, but Oli has no reason to lie to me. They were so pleased with me, in fact, I might get to go back and do more segments about other things. I would like that because it was really fun.
Consider how many news segments are taped in the world every single day: thousands upon thousands. I was simply grist for the mill this morning, but it was neat. If I can, I’ll post a clip of the piece on Facebook.
“Court of Honor, World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893”; painting by John Henry Twachtman. [Could be worse: my last name could be Twachtman.]I will not write about how cold it is in Chicago. I will not write about how cold it is in Chicago. I will not write about —
My god.
It’s so cold in Chicago, “minus twenty-five” actually refers to the number of people we’ve lost to frostbite in the last hour.
It’s so cold in Chicago, when your older brother tells you to chill, you burst into tears.
It’s so cold in Chicago, you’d think you be at a bar where all the chicks is models.
It’s so cold in Chicago, the ice machines in all the restaurants are out back smoking cigarettes because dude.
It’s so cold in Chicago, I put on a shirt, a sweater, and another sweater this morning. I carefully wrapped my scarf around and around my neck and face, put on my hat and gloves, and pulled on my flea-market fur coat. Double socks, then out the door to the Latin School to talk about poems and teach storytelling to some of the most incredible students on the planet. (They’re also some of the most hardcore; Latin stayed open while most public schools in Chicago closed for the “extreme weather.” It really was -25 today.) I walked to the school from my hotel thinking, “Well, I’m bundled up. I’ll get a little walk in this morning.” The cold took my breath away; it took a half-hour being inside before my toes stopped aching.
I’m headed to Austin now for QuiltCon. When I get to Texas tonight, I’ll hang my fur coat up in the closet and I will not look at it till I leave. Remind me to get an entourage, by the way. I love my life but the schlep is killing me.
“Maslanitsa,” by Boris Kustodiev, 1918. Stick Rod Serling’s face in there somewhere and you’ve got it.
I remember exactly one Twilight Zone episode out of the dozen or so I saw accidentally as a kid. The one I remember, not surprisingly, is the one that scarred me for life. I was about eight when I saw it and I think about it whenever life presents an obvious twist of fate.
In the episode, a pretty lady is driving a car one night and she gets into a bad wreck. The cosmos, God, fate, etc., had determined that she would die as a result. Like, it was written in some big ledger in the sky that her time was up and she was supposed to die that night. But then she doesn’t. There is a wrinkle in the time-space continuum or something and she survives without a scratch. She’s happy about this until zombies.
These way-too-scary-for-an-eight-year-old people-creatures who, looking back, were totally zombies though I didn’t know what zombies were at the time, began appearing in this woman’s world. They weren’t everywhere at first but as she went through her life in the next few weeks, these people-creatures would pop up and like, grab at her.** Their goal was to take her to the other side, the side she was supposed to be on. She was in the living world, but that was wrong. She was an escapee from the natural order of things, a rogue moment that had to be corrected because… Well, because it made for a great Twilight Zone episode, I guess.
NOTE: To all the brilliant, gracious, attractive ladies in my lecture and class outside Richmond, VA, thank you for a wonderful day today and please do not in any way think that I am connecting you with zombies from the Twilight Zone.
That said, tonight I’m totally the lady from the other side. Because I should still be in Richmond. It is written that I should be giving my second lecture right now to a large group of quilters at the fabulous Sew Refreshing shop. But I’m not there. There’s been a wrinkle in the time-space continuum and I am home. In my pajamas. AAAAAGHHHHH!
It’s because a snowpocalypse snow storm is bearing down on the east coast. Richmond, a city that owns maybe 1.2 snow plows, both made in 1946, is expected to get a foot of snow tonight. Terri, my host and owner of the shop picked me up this morning and said, so sweetly, “Mary, ah… Well, I’m just wondering about the lecture we added this evening… Well, we’re going to get about twelve inches starting this afternoon and I just don’t know that the ladies should be driving in the weather…” I knew what she was suggesting and was 100% onboard, sad as it is to cancel an event. Truth was, I wasn’t so sure about doing the evening lecture after I heard the weather report.
“Terri, absolutely. We should cancel the evening program. I’ll look at the train schedule.”
And so it was that after my morning lecture and the 1,000 Pyramid class — such a good class! — I went to the train station and got the 4:00-ish #80 Amtrak back into Washington. I almost got off at Fredericksburg because I’m a Civil War nerd and I’m dying to check it out, but I figured with the blizzard and all and not knowing a single thing about Fredericksburg other than it being an historic battle site, I should wait.
I should be in a smart outfit with a laser pointer, but instead I’m drinking juice. I’m on my couch. There are no zombies in the closet, though. I know because I checked.
** Please remember that I’m describing a Twilight Zone episode I saw once when I was like, eight. If some of you know the episode well, forgive me for butchering (!) it. I’m only recounting what scarred me for life, not the mise en scene or the actress in the title role. I only remember death.
Astaire in Royal Wedding. Can you imagine how shiny his shoes are? With the suit and the top hat?? Oh, brother.
I’m in downtown Chicago for the next twenty-four and I’m feelin’ fine.
The buildings look just like I remember them (tall, smart) and the weather is a familiar negative ten-thousand degrees. It’s great! I love Chicago so much. As I clippity-clopped through the city today, doing errands, I thought about the expression, “I know _____ like the back of my hand.” I’ll bet I know downtown Chicago better. I’ve seen the back of my hand a lot, but which one? And at what stage of life? My hands keep changing, but Chicago is Chicago is Chicago.
But a city is hell on shoes. The low-slung cowboy boots I’ve been hoofing around in for the past couple months were looking awful: dirty and dull, desperately in need of a shoe facial. So, after I turned in a bunch of work, etc., I went in search of a shoe shine shop. Find one I did, and I sat there trying not to smile like a weirdo through the whole thing because I had forgotten that there is perhaps nothing on Earth — on Earth — that feels better than walking out of a shoe shine shop with shiny shoes. Hey, don’t take my word for it: take Fred Astaire’s word for it. Take Fred Astaire’s word for everything. There’s a song he sings called “Put a Shine On Your Shoes” in the MGM movie The Bandwagon. This song says everything better than I could say on this topic. Consider:
When you feel as low/As the bottom of a well/And can’t get out of the mood/Do something to perk yourself up/And change your attitude/Give a tug to your tie/Put a crease in your pants/But if you really want to feel fine/Give your shoes a shine
When there’s a shine on your shoes/There’s a melody in your heart/With a singable happy feeling/A wonderful way to start/To face the world every day/With a deedle-dum-dee-dah-dah/A little melody that is making/The worrying world go by
Put a shine on your shoes/Put a shine on your shoes… [REPEAT AD INFINITUM.]
The number is marvelous. Astaire twirls up to the guy working the shoe shine stand and wins him over like he always wins everyone over; before long, the guy is killing the rhythm with his brushes and his towel as he works. Of course, all the extras in the background are happy, smiling at the song and dance. There are some charming slapstick moments — there so often were in these sorts of films — but obviously the best thing about it is that it’s a number about feet and it’s Fred Astaire, so what more do you want in life? In life! A number focusing expressly on Fred Astaire’s feet?? Just… Just stick a fork in me. I’m done. You’re done, too! There’s no way you’re going to keep reading this because you’re clicking over to YouTube right now to watch Fred Astaire dance, aren’t you? It’s okay. I left writing to watch it, too.
Have you come back? I hope so. I’m almost done. I only wanted to say that my boots look brand new after my shoe shine. In fact, they look better than when I got them. I’m a new woman. And the coolest thing was when the guy was almost finished, he did one final back n’ forth with the clean towel around each heel and quick whipped it off with a “thwap!” It was like a gun went off, it was so loud! Awesome. If it’s possible to tip too liberally, I did.
I heard a parable once that stuck to me like bubblegum on my high heels. It’s one you may have heard yourself — you’ll recognize it at once if you have — and if you haven’t, do enjoy the stickiness. This is my retelling, which I’m sure is clear.
There once was a farmer who had a single horse with which to work his land. One day, the horse ran away. “That is terrible news!” said his concerned neighbor. The farmer shrugged and said, “Who’s to say what is good and what is bad?” The neighbor probably looked at him like he was weird. He was kind of weird, but that has nothing to do with the story.
The horse came back the very next day and brought another horse with him! Very good news, no? Maybe, maybe not. Because the farmer gave the second horse to his strapping son and the next day, the horse threw the young man off and he broke his leg in like nine places. The (nosy) concerned neighbor said, “Ooh! Now that is bad news!” but the farmer put up his hands and said, “Who’s to say what is good and what is bad?” Now the neighbor was like, “See ya,” and he didn’t take over a hot dish to the son, who was convalescing.
In a week or so, the king’s men — because we are in Arthurian England, suddenly — came to take every able-bodied man to war. They didn’t take the farmer’s son, clearly, because he was useless to them with the broken leg.
Good news, no?
I think about this story so much. Because again and again and again in my life, I see this playing out. When I moved away to college, I was sad and afraid. But then, you know, college was awesome. I got a job in a nightclub when I was twenty-two and thought, “Boo-yah!” but it was terrible after awhile. I was so excited to move to New York City last year and then it turned so sour. And I was incredibly sad and disappointed when I had to relinquish my lovely D.C. townhouse to the rat, rat, rats, but do you know that… Well, I’m so happy here. I love this building now. It’s cozy. It’s safer. The sun comes up over Washington D.C. in peachy pink and golden orange and I just feel so happy.
I’m not sure how anemia can be good, but who knows? The boy in the story who shattered his leg certainly didn’t think it was very good, but then he didn’t have to fight in a war. Maybe I’ll be spared a war.
Here’s what happened. No pity party, just the facts.
I’m crazy anemic. On top of that, I’m leaking blood somewhere, and this wimpy system got hit with a virus that was less like “the flu,” more like “the Invasion of Normandy.” The triple-threat was disastrous.
I sort of knew I was kind of anemic; I remember a doctor saying something about this years ago. But I didn’t know it was a big deal and I figured it was related to surgeries. Mild anemia is not a big deal, but severe anemia is and it’s not just related to surgeries. Anemia, by the way, is “a condition marked by a deficiency of red blood cells or of hemoglobin in the blood, resulting in pallor and weariness.” I’ve always been pasty and pale; now I know there’s a reason I look like a character cut from Twilight. When taping the TV show last year, I caught myself on the monitor standing next to a tanned, Texas-dwelling Liz Porter and scared the badoobies out of myself; I was practically translucent by comparison.
The headache came on Thursday night, an H.R. Geiger creature trying and failing to claw its way out of my head (the failing part made it try harder, see.) I do remember things — spinal taps don’t fade from memory quickly — but it’s all in patches, including a visit from my Chicago GI doctor one of the days I was at Northwestern. Dr. Yun asked me, “Mary, what the heck is going on with you??” I remember croaking out, “I have to get on a plane to D.C. tomorrow morning” and she basically laughed me out of the building. My mother came in from Iowa; if you said you’d give me five million dollars to tell you when she arrived, I would not be able to take that money home. My sister and her fiance visited; I remember stories they told me of their visit to India, but when did they come? How long did they stay? I remember texting three people, one time each, but I can’t remember one of the people I texted and I have no idea what I said. A friend came to visit and all I remember is him opening his mail. I blogged twice and I am so afraid to read those entries for fear they were absolutely unintelligible.
They did an upper GI. They did another pouchoscopy. They did a CT of my brain. No bleeding so far. They tried an MRI but I pressed the panic button; the congestion in my chest was so bad, I couldn’t breathe outside of a head-locking, skull-screw, mask device; inside one, I was a basket case. I’ll reschedule that and the pelvic ultrasound.
So there you have it. Tomorrow, lighter fare. Now I must rest. I am in D.C. again, horizontal, unable to move anything but my fingers. They’re fine! I feel like I got punched in the ribs and someone has been beating my organs with a fish.
The USS Stewert in Shanghai, China, 1927. Photo : William Verge.
This will have to be short because a) I can’t see straight to type and b) my brain is on a 90-second time delay.
On Thursday afternoon, I came into Chicago. I had a doctor’s followup appointment, a meeting, and I had various Chicago-based errands to run. A short trip: in on Thursday, out Saturday morning.
Thursday night, around 9:30 pm, I was gripped with a terrible headache. I thought, “Wow, this is a terrible headache,” and I lay down. At 2 am, I woke up with a sob. I took a bath. I put a cold washcloth on my head and pressed my forehead to the tile on the shower stall. It was cool, the tile. I noticed that my entire body was weak — like, couldn’t-lift-my-limbs weak. Back to bed, pleading with the gods, I told myself, “Okay, okay, chill. Chill, chill, please chill.”
Two hours later, I was awake again.
This time, it was worse in the head. I gasped; it felt like there was an animal in my skull (a rat) trying to escape. I took a heroic dose of Tylenol and tried to rest. I hit all the acupressure points I had ever heard about. At 6 am, I woke again and could hardly move. I tried to get the phone to call downstairs for a taxi; that didn’t work. Nor did it work to get my jeans on. I managed both things eventually, which would have been to my astonishment had I the will to be astonished. I got myself over to the ER at Northwestern, thankfully just four blocks away. I took a taxi because taxi = $5; ambulance = $750. Even in my stupor, I knew to take the cab.
I was admitted fast. I have had three bags of blood transfused since then. A normal person’s hemoglobin count is 15; mine is hovering at four.
To make sure I’m not bleeding in my brain, I had a lumbar puncture before coming into this room. I have had a CT scan, a failed MRI (I got claustrophobic because I also have a viral respiratory issue??) and I have an upper endoscopy and a lady-parts ultrasound scheduled for a few hours from now. It’s quite possible that the hemoglobin problem, the anemia problem is directly related to GI stuff, but we don’t know, yet.
I felt totally fine on Thursday. A little tired. But who isn’t.
On Wednesday next week, my popular webinar series is examining white in our quilts. When you make quilts, white — and all its gorgeous variations: bone, oyster, muslin, snow, cream, etc. — is not a “non-color.” White brings breath, space, and contrast to the rainbow of color that is our palette.
In case you’ve never watched a webinar, it’s really fun. My series is dense with information but entertaining, too. I mean, come on. It’s me. You know there are going to be a few monkey jokes in there. But I treat quilting with great respect and I’m a history and design nerd, so you’ll get your money’s worth.
Here is some anonymous feedback from folks who have joined the Color Me Quilter webinars over the past few months — so you don’t have to take my word for it.
Click on the “Webinars” tab on my homepage to get your ticket. And thanks.
“New interesting aspects to approach to choose colors – helps me with my quilts.”
“Changed how I look at the colour black – I usually think of it as a “non-color” to use when I can’t find anything else. Now I will look at Black as a key component of any colour grouping.”
“I am fairly new to quilting; quilting courses not easily available in my location so it is extremely beneficial to have an update on some of the basics – bindings, quilting techniques, applique etc.”
“Keep up the good work! I’m looking forward to the next program I participate in.”
“I downloaded the seminar so that I can go over it again. Usually, a second reading like going back through my magazines, I find something I missed. Reminds me of reading stories to my young children the 20th time. Find those small details!”
I wanted to use more black and found the accent colors that she used very helpful.
“A lot more information than I thought. I didn’t even know there was that much to know about the color yellow — my favorite!”
“It was great to have both Mary and Marianne on the webinar. Each offered their perspective which was very interesting. Blue is a favorite color of mine as well. I particularly enjoyed the history of blue. Indigo is amazing!” [Note: Mom was a special guest on “Blue.”]
“Mary’s an AWESOME presenter … very entertaining and motivating – a great teacher on quilting.”
“The historical information about popular color combinations of the past was very interesting. The slides were well-chosen.”
!["Court of Honor, World's Columbian Exposition, 1893"; painting by John Henry Twachtman. [Could be worse: my last name could be Twachtman.]](http://www.papergirltoo.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/John_Henry_Twachtman_-_Court_of_Honor_Worlds_Columbian_Exposition_Chicago_1893.jpg)
